Yet another woman has been driven off Twitter by misogynistic fanboy bullies angry that she had invaded their putatively male turf. This time, the arena is comics, and the woman in question is writer Chelsea Cain, a bestselling novelist who brought her feminist sensibility to the Marvel comic book series Mockingbird, which recently came to an end after eight issues.

Cain deleted her account on Twitter yesterday, after a series of tweets aimed at the misogyny that’s still rife in the comics world.

Cain’s resignation from Twitter prompted a flood of support, on Twitter and elsewhere, from fans and others troubled by misogyny online.

Her detractors responded by declaring that it was all a big hoax — that she’d made up the misogynistic harassment she claimed she’d gotten. And also that she sucked and feminism sucked and that it was a terrible thing that she and other feminists were ruining comics and that no, the harassment of her, which didn’t exist, had nothing to do with sexism, it was just because she sucked.

Nothing more than seeking attention. Where's the proof she harassed? Not a single screenshot of abuse, how convenient #StandWithChelseaCain

So free speech is ok, but free comic development is not ok. So selfawareness, and absolutely no double-standard. At all.
Maybe they think life will give them an achievment like a console, something like the “Whinning Achievment”, “Troll Achievement” or “Harassment Achievment”. From the bottom of her well, the frog is still complaining.

Comic book fans, and many geeks in general, will claim that they were bullied in high school and grapple with trauma from insults and verbal harassment they received. Which may very well be true. But now those same fans and geeks, usually men, are telling women and people of color that insults and harassment are just words; toughen up.

Her detractors responded by declaring that it was all a big hoax — that she’d made up the misogynistic harassment she claimed she’d gotten.

Well, thank goodness they made sure to actually dump misogynistic harassment on her to retroactively prove her right. Good Samaritans doing good work is what they are. /s

Also, FUCK that asshole who dares claim that “this has nothing to do with sexism, she’s just a bad writer”. Holy fuck do I wish that I had some handy chart showing “number of times women are accused of being bad writers” vs “number of times men are accused of being bad writers”.

It’s almost as if when a woman isn’t working within a box of behaviors acceptable to a specific audience, she’s torn down and all manner of harassment and threats are justified.

Which is a phenomenon that is in no way anything like the treatment of women who aren’t perceived of as sufficiently liberal. Nope. Not at all.

For all you guys wondering about Black Steampunk, its called SteamFunk (and a bunch of other names) and there are many different kinds, with anthology series, short films and cosplay. Its beautiful:

AFROPUNK – … the other Black experience

And visit the website Chronicles of Harriet, which deals with all things Steampunk, SteamFunk, Afro Punk, Afro-Future Punk, etc. in the Black community. It even has cosplay and costume segments for the Black cosplayer. They’re gorgeous!

I love video games, and I love the idea of this Zoe Quinn/Chuck Tingle collaboration. My concern though is that things that are made with the purpose of being so-bad-it’s-good tend to just be bad.

I intend to pledge as a Spaghetti Sweetie, and recommend the same to others, because “spaghetti” is tied to a bunch of memes on 4chan and I expect a significant number of awful people will feel upset about “their” jokes being appropriated.

2nd: Your article link from the TheEstablishment.co is FANTASTIC. This quote, in particular, is well worth sharing:

White nationalist David Duke high-fiving Assange on Twitter is a sign that it’s long, long overdue for progressives to consider the source of the material leading them to think certain feminist and black journalists are traitors to all that is right and good.

This is the first I’ve heard about this. Am I living under a rock inadvertently, or is this not something that has been reported sufficiently? To me, if someone hobnobs with a prominent white nationalist and former grand dragon of the Klan, this immediately calls everything about that person into question. I suppose that may be the fallacy of the poisoned well, but racism is SUCH a noxious, ubiquitous, and pernicious toxin that frankly I’d like to be a few counties away from the well at this point.

There was something I wanted to run past you, but I’m not sure if it’s a bit weird. But as we’re speaking about comics. For various reasons I’ve been on a bit of a nostalgia trip in regards to some Brit comics of my youth. You’ve mentioned you’re a fan of The Wall so there’s one character I thought you might be interested in. She was the first black woman main character with her own strip over here. The backstory behind how she was created is, I think, quite interesting in itself. But I’d be interested in your take on her. Please tell me to stick if I’m being out of order, but if you wouldn’t mind having a look let me know. Cheers.

First perhaps a little background as to how she came about. Back in the 70s IPC publishing brought out a comic called ‘Action’. It was phenomenally popular. Unfortunately it got banned and was effectively relaunched as ‘2000AD’ (the theory being that they could get away with the themes if they presented them in a sci-fi/fantasy context). IPC’s main rival DC Thompson created a comic called ‘The Crunch’ to compete with Action/2000AD. IPC then created a distaff version of 2000AD called Misty. So again DC Thompson set out to create their own version. The rule was ‘no ponies, no ballerinas’. Unfortuately the project was abandoned. However Ebony was one of the stritps they’d created and they though she was too good to waste so they published the stories in The Crunch.

As to Ebony herself, she’s the daughter of an ex British army officer and works for the special missions section of MI6. Apart from her name and her ‘She’s black, beautiful and deadly’ tagline, her ethnicity didn’t appear to be a major feature of the stores themselves; although she wasn’t a fan of racists. Anyway, I can dig a bit more stuff up if you’re interested.

@Dalillama, of course the Girl Genius would be first to bat with exactly the steampunk I was looking for. Thank you 😉

Gotta say though, Steamfunk? My god that sounds awesome. Reading that article I can understand the issue – Steampunk generally has this Victoriana bent to it that hauls a lot of colonial and imperial visions which clash with a lot of, well. With a lot of humanity. Still, I’m super pleased that it’s being chewed up and digested by other cultures, making it into something new and unique.

(I’d really, really like to see some alternate history fiction where the Kingdom of Mali/Songhai was able to fend off the colonial powers, and where Ethiopia managed to fend off the Italians and reclaim old Abyssinia. That would make a great story, I think. That’s just me though!)

The video game Guns of Icarus was made by a team of British people of Asian ethnicity, IIRC. Given that it’s a game about steam-powered airship combat in which you can dress up your characters in waistcoats, corsets and goggles, I defy anyone to say that it’s not steampunk.

The band Sunday Driver do a fusion of steampunk folk-rock music with traditional Indian music, based around steampunk themes and played whilst wearing goggles, so I would argue that they count too.

I’m sayin! I waited 13 episodes for that arm, and they dare to deny me!? The fro woulda been sweet too, but her poofy curls are cool too
Apparently, she was explicitly told not to straighten her hair 🙂

Yeah, I was waiting for that arm and to come off and didn’t care too much for that tease later in the series. Marvel owes me a golden arm!

A Misty/Colleen teamup is the ONLY reason I’m going to watch Iron Fist.

I love Iron Fist in the comics, but I’m angry because once again we’re getting a Might Whitey in Asia trope from Marvel (on top of Dr. Strange, already) and I really stanned for an Asian American to play either of those characters rather than reproducing the same Yellow Peril narratives that ruined Daredevil.

Anyway, for the poster above there is such an African inspired Steampunk novel. It’s brand new, EVERFAIR, written by Nisi Shawl, about how The Congo had defeated being colonized by Belgium because they discovered Steam power first.

@lkeke35, thank you! Everfair looks excellent, and the whole Belgian/Congo thing is something of a blank spot in my knowledge, so I really should pick it up! I really hope I get the time to do some more recreational reading soon. Sounds very up my alley! I’m not huge into steampunk but I do really enjoy the optimism of the genre.

And the style. Oh god the style. I would be a very happy pony if I could just design funky clothes all day. So good.

I got used to a certain level of take-down tweets after that. Every time an issue came out. I’d get lots of love and support. And a handful of people who seem to thrive off making sure strangers feel hated. I guess it’s a way of being seen. It’s not different than what most comic book writers deal with, especially female ones. The tweets that bothered me were never the ones concerned with content; they were the ones that questioned my right to write comics at all, and were disgusted by the idea of a female hero having her own series.

…

Wednesday, I had a bubble of these types of tweets. Mockingbird had been cancelled, and they were really celebrating. Understand that this is not me looking for mentions. These are tweets in my feed, people who tag me. It is not trolling. I was not being targeted. It was just a lot of people being jerks, per usual, but in greater numbers.

…

I posted a comment about how I was done with Twitter. And I went downstairs.

…

I exchanged a few more tweets with friends later Wednesday night.
The next morning, yesterday, I woke up to find that my Twitter feed had exploded. This was before a Comics Beat story ran later that morning, which REALLY got people interested. Overnight, I had lost thousands of followers. (I’d gone to bed with about 8500.) I had gained a thousand new followers. I had been tagged thousands of times.

Comments were coming in, fast and furious, every second. I’d never seen anything like it. I saw a few of them – a lot of support, a lot of people yelling at one another – a lot of people mad at me for being too quick on the block button or too critical of comic book readers or being too feminist. A lot of them just seemed mad at women in general.

I deactivated my account. I got up. I walked my dogs.

…

But know that I did not leave Twitter because of rape threats or because someone had posted my address, or any of the truly vile tactics you hear about. I left Twitter because of the ordinary daily abuse that I decided I didn’t want to live with anymore. …

Sure, by the time I deactivated my account on Thursday morning, the whole thing had imploded. And I bet that some of the thousands of posts on my feed were really really vicious. But I don’t know. Because you know what? I didn’t read them.

Wait, so 3 muffugas showed up to prove the point, all thinkin they had the smoking gun? And the “listen and believe” shit? What is it with these people and using SJW terminology they clearly don’t understand? Oh, this is just beauteous!

Nice Guy David, I’m not sure how you got from “She was so harassed that she didn’t even read all of her tweets, just shut down her account” to “She wasn’t harassed”, but I suggest you examine the path you took ’cause it’s off the edge of the dock. You want us to throw you a life preserver?

(I’d really, really like to see some alternate history fiction where the Kingdom of Mali/Songhai was able to fend off the colonial powers, and where Ethiopia managed to fend off the Italians and reclaim old Abyssinia. That would make a great story, I think. That’s just me though!)

Dunno if you’re into miniature wargames, but just such a Kingdom of Abyssinia is going to be one of the playable factions in the upcoming game “The Other Side,” set in the Victorian/Gothic/Steampunk/Wild West setting of Malifaux. We don’t know much yet except that they are going to be more technologically advanced than the other factions, while remaining steampunk.

We Hunted the Mammoth tracks and mocks the white male rage underlying the rise of Trump and Trumpism. This blog is NOT a safe space; given the subject matter -- misogyny and hate -- there's really no way it could be.